Decline & fall of Australia's cricket empire

'This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about.” When Graham Greene set the end of the world amid Brighton's gaudy decay and the grim pursuit of pleasure in his 1938 novel Brighton Rock , he didn't know what an apt setting it would be for the 2013 Australian cricket team.

The Australian cricketers arrive at Brighton's beachfront Hotel Metropole in good spirits, as if bearing the initial optimism of Greene's hero: “It's a good world if you don't weaken.” Their entourage is extensive and busy. If there is one certainty to flow from review after review of Australian cricket, it is that the staff will grow. The captain, Michael Clarke, is more immediately worried about missing this week's match against Sussex with a back injury than The Death of Cricket. He is trying, he says, to “keep my eyes on the horizon”. Just now, that horizon, in so far as it involves winning back the Ashes, keeps receding.

In the doldrums: Ryan Harris, left, and James Pattinson trudge from the field at Lord's after Australia went 2-0 down in the Ashes series. Photo: Getty Images

Whenever the Australian cricket captaincy changes hands, there has been a message, unspoken and understood, or frankly stated, as Ian Chappell said to Allan Border when he took over from Kim Hughes in 1984: “Congratulations. And make sure you beat the Poms.” Border became captain after Hughes' team lost six straight Test matches. In losing at Lord's this week, Clarke's team has equalled that “record”. While there have been no tearful resignations, the team's circumstances are magnified by the fact that this is an Ashes series. For the two countries, the England-Australia contest remains the fulcrum of cricket and the focus for symbolic self-assessment. Only in an Ashes series does a wider cultural self-esteem seem at stake. After losing the Ashes at home in 2010-11, Cricket Australia held a major review, under the businessman Don Argus, to set a new course for the game.

Two years post-Argus, the imbalance between the Australian and England XIs seems greater. Does this mean Australian cricket is on the skids? Given the game's colonial and post-colonial tradition of being a cipher for national health, does defeat against England bode ill for a more general cultural state?

Before reporting one case, it is prudent to consider the opposite, put by the game's governing body, that Australian cricket is in fact in the bloom of health.

This week, registrations are starting for cricket clubs for the 2013-14 summer. Numbers will be high – Cricket Australia's most recent national cricket census reports 880,291 participants in all cricket, an annual increase of 4.37 per cent over the past decade. The game's financial health is underpinned from below, in registration fees that reflect growing numbers, and from above, in the percolation of $470 million worth of new broadcast-rights income from the Nine and Ten networks. At the grassroots, rules are thoughtfully modified to increase participation. Junior cricket has reformed itself to retain less-talented kids (who used to field all day, bat down the order and give the game up as soon as possible) and less-committed parents, who cavil about a sport that takes up a half or full weekend day.

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At the professional level, cricket is maintaining popularity. Crowds and audiences for this summer's home Ashes series will be high, notwithstanding pessimistic forecasts. The Big Bash League has drawn new followers to the game, and will gain greater exposure on free-to-air television. The money and excitement of BBL cricket, and Twenty20 more widely, is held out as a lure to multitalented youngsters who might also be courted by football clubs. Elite programs in all states, and nationally, are designed to attract the most talented teenagers to cricket and keep them on a “pathway” to higher honours.

In Test cricket, the crisis may be, as crises often are, exaggerated. In the past two years, the Australian team has beaten India 4-0 at home, the West Indies 2-0 away, Sri Lanka 3-0 at home, and run the world's No. 1 team, South Africa, within a whisker of defeat. The current losing run has come at the hands of strong opponents in tailored foreign conditions. With luck, Australia could have beaten England two weeks ago in Nottingham, one of the closest Test matches played. The difference may be thinner than it looks. It breaks with long habit for Australians to give credit to English sportspeople, but the nature of cricket is to leave unanswered the question of whether we are making them look good or they are making us look bad.

So is Australian cricket all that rotten? If Australia's problems are systematic, then surely they were there during the team's 15 years of domination. If England's systematic strengths run deep, then they were also there when its Test team was a laughing stock. There is necessarily a disconnection between the state of Test cricket and cricket.

Perhaps, then, the function of the Test team is not so much to indicate health as to stimulate debate. There are 36,000 other Australian teams, junior and senior, club and school, male and female, but only one that sparks reform.

The Test team is the game's shop window. Presumably there are boys and girls out there who are, right now, fantasising about beating England. The Waugh brothers, Mark Taylor, Shane Warne and the rest of the generation of the 1990s grew up watching Australia lose the Ashes in England, and played with a determination born of bad memories.

But for others, a shabby shop window will deter entry. TV ratings – falling between the first and second Tests – portray a country switching off, and cricket's support winnowing down to the true believers. The game is fortunate that a free-to-air network has the rights for five years, or else it might slip from view. Television is important, and in England, an anxiety facing cricket is that the game is only available to pay-television subscribers.

Senior statesmen of the game are concerned about the manner of Australia's losses in England. The chickens of the top-order batting, a weakness for several years in Australian first-class cricket, have come home to roost. Is it a symptom of a deeper malaise? Poor defensive batting and shallow back-up indicate a weak first-class scene; weak first-class cricket indicates poor pitches, poor coaching and poor grounding in the fundamentals; poor fundamentals indicate the incursion of Twenty20 cricket and so-called Gen Y attitudes; too much Twenty20 indicates a withering of the grassroots. Cricket itself is changing. John Benaud, the former Test player and selector, said this week that third-grade players were now playing first-grade. Generally bemoaned is the loss of players in their 30s, who once mentored younger cricketers but are now spending their Saturdays with their families, or cycling, surfing or bushwalking (culturally speaking, not necessarily a bad thing). The cricket census showed one area of declining participation: club cricket, down by 3.5 per cent in the past year.

Club cricket has been hollowed out from both ends. While older players leave, elite junior cricketers are increasingly taken out of the clubs onto academy-based “pathways”, often finding themselves playing only against each other, and not getting the steel reinforcement that club cricket once provided. Greg Chappell strongly advocates a base system like that in which he grew up during the 1960s, when star youngsters learnt their game by competing against club stalwarts, other rising talents, cranky old men, state and Test players. Now, they inhabit parallel worlds. The recently retired Mike Hussey says Sheffield Shield, more and more a glorified youth competition, is not the grounding it was 10 years ago for Test cricket.

Twenty20 has been fostered by a business plan in which cricket sees other sports as its rivals. There have been 171 first-grade professional footballers who have played state or Test cricket. The last one was Victoria's Nick Jewell, in 1997. Since 1970, there has been no first-grade footballer who has played Test cricket. This may seem obvious in today's hyper-specialised world. But when the question is asked why Shane Watson is not in Keith Miller's class as a Test all-rounder, the answer is that today's Keith Millers are playing football – where the chances of a successful, well-paid career, playing regularly in front of big crowds at a young age, are better than in cricket. Twenty20, a fast-track to fame and fortune, has an appeal. But the catch-22 is that three-hour cricketers are not equipping themselves for the five-day game.

Talent comes in cycles, and that may be the inescapable reason for the Test team's downswing. But to sit back and wait for the wheel to turn is unacceptably passive to those who run, and care for, cricket. Losing has a benefit, which is that it destroys complacency. Already, the Australian season is being reprogrammed so that first-class cricket is played in a two-month block without being cannibalised by the BBL. The Argus review will be reviewed. In Brighton, Clarke and his men are trying to see the bigger picture. England changed the way it approached its cricket as a response to failure, so that when the talent cycle turned, the game was positioned to capitalise. Learning from the English doesn't come easily to Australians, but they exported the game to the colonies in the 19th century and might have a few lessons now.